Panasonic/National/Technics Audio Cassette history.

Matsushita Electric Industrial is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics corporation founded in 1918. It used several brand names for their product: National (since 1927), Panasonic (since 1955), Technics (since 1965). National brand was only used for domestic japanese market.

Matsushita made its own tapes and sourced them, depending on what they were (mainly TDK, around 1980's from DENON). They sold tapes in mass market stores in Japan and a few other markets, but mainly were niche tapes in most markets for audio.

Matsushita developed metal evaporated tape (ME metal tape) as opposed to metal particle tape (MP metal tape) developed by Scotch. Matsushita makes a ME metal tape by evaporating metal in a vacuum so that a vapour deposits itself on the plastic film. ME proved to be difficult and expensive to mass-produce. The ME tape proved to be ideal for Video tapes. These tapes came out as the 'Angrom' line.

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